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Kerr was born in 1934 in Gore, New Zealand. Born into a dysfunctional family, his mother was forced to leave when he was three. When his father went to war, he was sent to a farm. After his father's return from war, they moved to Christchurch. He managed to get into St Andrew's College, a private school, as his father had served under a former headmaster.[2] His solution to Einstein's equations predicted spinning black holes before they were discovered.[3]

Kerr is married to Margaret.[2] In 2013 they moved from Christchurch to Tauranga.

Kerr was a notable bridge player representing New Zealand internationally in the mid 1970s.[4] He was co-author of the Symmetric Relay System, a bidding system.[5]

Kerr's mathematical talent was first recognised while he was still a high school student at St Andrew's College. Although there was no maths teacher there at the time he was able in 1951 to go straight into third year Mathematics at the Canterbury University College of the University of New Zealand, the precursor to the University of Canterbury. Their regulations did not permit him to graduate until 1954 and so it was not until September 1955 that he moved to the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD in 1959. His dissertation concerned the difficult problem of the equations of motion in general relativity.

In 1962 Kerr moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where in 1963, he discovered the Kerr vacuum solution.[9] In 1965, with Alfred Schild, he introduced the concept of Kerr-Schild spacetimes.[10] During his time in Texas, Kerr supervised four PhD students. Kerr was interviewed about his work on the solution for the book Cracking the Einstein Code: Relativity and the Birth of Black Hole Physics, for which he also wrote an afterword.[11]

In 1971, Kerr returned to the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where he remained until his retirement in 1993. Kerr retired from his position as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Canterbury in 1993 after having been there for twenty-two years, including ten years as the head of the Mathematics department.

In 2008 Kerr was appointed to the Yevgeny Lifshitz ICRANet Chair in Pescara, Italy.